Category: Computers, Science & Technology

Yes, they are coming! You will be able to use a Bitcoin ATM to get money out of your account!

Lamassu Introduces Open-Source Software for Bitcoin ATM Network

“Lamassu operators can now provide remittance, airport cash exchange and bill payment services via their bitcoin ATMs following the release of Rakía, the company’s new open-source software platform.

With the change, current operators of Lamassu ATMs will become independent nodes, no longer having to rely on a centralized service. In turn, they will be able to retain control of price settings, commission rates and background trading.

In a statement, Lamassu co-founder Zach Harvey said that the company doesn’t intend to become another money transfer or exchange service like Western Union or Travelex:

‘We want to create a platform for thousands of small businesses to compete against these legacy financial institutions, and against each other. These are markets in dire need of fierce competition to bring down transfer and exchange fees.’

Rakía is currently available on GitHub. The software will demo at the CoinSummit conference in London on 10th-11th July.

Rakía in the remittance market

Speaking to CoinDesk, Harvey emphasized the Rakía platform’s case for shaking up the remittance market and bridging the gap between developed and developing countries.

For the unbanked population of the world, bank-less ATMs are a viable way to convert cash in a more manageable format, he said, adding:

‘I think it’s a great transitional stage for cryptocurrencies. It’s important to the developed world because its legacy financial institutions are flawed. But it’s even more important to emerging markets since many have no access to financial institutions at all.’

Putting plans into action

Harvey further outlined a couple of ways the new software could help remittances – the first being integration with a third-party remittance service like Kipochi, BitPesa or 37coins.

Secondly, Harvey cited fiat-pegged wallet services like BitReserve, which let users send a certain amount of funds to a bitcoin wallet pegged to the receiver’s local currency. The recipient would then use either a cash-out bitcoin ATM or a bitcoin-to-cash agent to receive their funds.

The third way, Harvey described, would be for independent agents to use Lamassu’s open-source software to create tools that connect the sending and receiving parties.

Behind each of these use cases is the drive to remove the risk of volatility. ‘Otherwise, he said, ‘it’s just a matter of converting fiat to bitcoin and bitcoin back to a different fiat currency.’ He added:

‘The other main point of these services is to offer a fiat A to fiat B without the sending or receiving parties touching bitcoin, but rather having it completely behind the scenes.’

Competition heats up

The news comes amid increasing competition between Lamassu and Nevada-based Robocoin, which recently rebranded its ATM network as an online bank. In its announcement, CEO Jordan Kelley spoke at length about his company’s wider goal of tapping the potentially lucrative bitcoin remittance market.

Lamassu began taking pre-orders for its bitcoin ATMs late last year, and was one of the first entrants in what has become an increasingly competitive market.

In April, the company announced that its products would soon become portals for bitcoin services like remittance services and bill payments. One month later Lamassu introduced two-way transactions to its machines, both moves that suggests it is seeking to keep ahead of its competition.”

No. But they are banning porn advertising in their AdWords Program. Fine with me!

Google bans porn on AdWords

Daily Digest News – “Porn advertisers may soon be flocking to Bing, because starting this week, ads promoting sexually explicit content are prohibited on Google AdWords. The search engine giant informed potentially affected advertisers of the policy change by email earlier in June, according to CNBC.

‘Beginning in the coming weeks, we’ll no longer accept ads that promote graphic depictions of sexual acts,’ Google wrote in the email. ‘When we make this change, Google will disapprove all ads and sites that are identified as being in violation of our revised policy.’

Rumblings of the porn ban were present as early as March, when Google announced it would be updating its adult sexual services, family status and underage and non-consensual sex acts policy pages. At that time, the company clarified that ads for strip clubs, ‘adult and sexual’ dating sites and ‘non-intimate’ massage services would continue to be accepted, albeit subject to tight restrictions.

Despite the early warnings, CNBC reports that the policy change took at least some in the adult entertainment industry by surprise.

‘I was caught by surprise,’ Theo Sapoutzis, chairman and CEO of AVN Media Network told CNBC. ‘I was one of the very first advertisers for AdWords back in 2002. It’s something that’s been [untouched] for 12 years, so you don’t expect change is going to start happening.’

The ad ban will not affect search results, only the ads that appear at the top of the page. So the millions of porn searchers can breath a sigh of relief. CNBC reports that in the month of May alone, there were nearly 351 million searches for the words ‘sex,’ ‘porn,’ ‘free porn’ and ‘porno.'”

First IBM sold it’s PC business to Lenova, a China-based company, now they are selling their SERVER business to Lenovo. Wow!

China approves IBM, Lenovo server deal

ZDNet – By: Charlie Osborne – “China has approved Lenovo’s proposed buy of IBM’s x86 server business, leaving only US regulators to decide whether to support the purchase.

According to Reuters, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce anti-monopoly department has approved the acquisition, but Lenovo still requires approval from US authorities to go ahead.

Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s low-end server business was announced in January. The deal, worth $2.3 billion, gives the Chinese PC maker control of IBM’s x86 servers, blade networking and maintenance operations. The acquisition will impact thousands of employees, of which have been offered places on Lenovo’s payroll.

Lenvo CEO Yang Yuanqing hopes the deal will be finalized by the end of the year, and does not believe regulatory bodies will prevent the purchase from occurring.

US security officials and members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), however, may have a different opinion. In June, it was reported that US regulators are concerned that national security may be weakened, and ‘Chinese spies’ may be able to access the Pentagon’s servers.

The issue is servers, currently belonging to IBM, which support the Pentagon’s networks. Under the terms of the acquisition, Lenovo would take over maintenance of these servers — which may pave the way for weakened security. The US and China have exchanged criticism and blows over cybersecurity in recent years, and both sides have accused each other of spying and cyberattacks.

Yang, however, said at a press conference that ‘If you look at our history, with domestic and overseas clients, there have never been any issues regarding security.'”

Whoa! Now Facebook is messin’ with our minds?!

Facebook And The Ethics Of User Manipulation

TechCrunch – by Alex Wilhelm – “A recent, partially Army-funded study conscripted Facebook users as unwitting participants during a weeklong experiment in direct emotional manipulation. The study set out to discover if the emotional tone of a users’ News Feed content had an impact on their own emotional makeup, measured through the tone of what they posted to the social service after viewing the skewed material.

Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were shown either more positive, or more negative content. The study found that users who were given more positive news feeds posted more positive things, and users who were given more negative news feeds posted more negative things.

Surprising? Doubtful. Unethical? Yes.

Bear it in mind that the impact of the study wasn’t contained merely to those it directly manipulated. It notes that around 155,000 users from the positive and negative groups each “posted at least one status update during the experimental period.” So, hundreds of thousands of status updates were posted by the negatively-induced user group. Those negative posts likely caused more posts of similar ilk.

Contagion, after all, doesn’t end at the doorstep.

We won’t know if the experiment did any more than darken the days of a few hundred thousand users for a week in 2012. But it could have. And that’s enough to make a call on this: Allowing your users to be unwitting test subjects of emotional manipulation is beyond creepy. It’s a damn disrespectful and dangerous choice.

Not everyone is in a good emotional spot. At any given moment, a decent chunk of Facebook’s users are emotionally fragile. We know that because at any given moment, a decent chunk of humanity of emotionally fragile, and Facebook has a massive number of active users. That means that among the negatively influenced were the weak, the vulnerable, and potentially the young. I’ve reached out to Facebook asking if the study excluded users between the ages of 13 and 18, but haven’t yet heard back.

Adding extraneous, unneeded emotional strain to a person of good mental health is an unkindness. Doing so to a person who needs encouragement and support is cruel.

The average Facebook user has something akin to an unwritten social contract with the company: I use your product, and you serve ads against the data I’ve shared. Implicit to that is expected polite behavior, the idea that Facebook won’t abuse your data, or your trust. In this case, Facebook did both, using a user’s social graph against them, with intent to cause emotional duress.

We’re all manipulated by corporations. Advertising is among the more blatant examples of it. There’s far more of it out there than we realize. The pervasiveness of the manipulation makes us slightly inured to it, undoubtedly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t point out things that are over the line when we are shown what’s going on behind the curtain. If Facebook was willing to allow this experiment — lead author of which, according to the study itself is a Facebook employee working on its Core Data Science Team — what else might it allow in the future?

I am not arguing that Facebook has a moral imperative to make news feed content more positive on average. That would render the service intolerable — not all life events are positive, and the ability to commiserate with friends and loved ones digitally is now part of the human experience. And Facebook certainly tweaks its news feed over time for myriad reasons to improve its experience.

That’s all perfectly reasonable. Deliberately looking to skew the emotional makeup of its users, spreading negativity for no purpose other than curiosity without user assent and practical safeguards is different. It’s irresponsible.

Here’s the response from Facebook’s Kramer:

OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my and Jamie and Jeff’s recent study published in PNAS, and I wanted to give a brief public explanation. The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.

Regarding methodology, our research sought to investigate the above claim by very minimally deprioritizing a small percentage of content in News Feed (based on whether there was an emotional word in the post) for a group of people (about 0.04% of users, or 1 in 2500) for a short period (one week, in early 2012). Nobody’s posts were “hidden,” they just didn’t show up on some loads of Feed. Those posts were always visible on friends’ timelines, and could have shown up on subsequent News Feed loads. And we found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses is.

And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it — the result was that people produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week.

The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.

While we’ve always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then. Those review practices will also incorporate what we’ve learned from the reaction to this paper.”

This is an interesting idea… they say that “information desires to be free!” And, it gets us closer to ubiquitous WiFi!

This Tool Boosts Your Privacy by Opening Your Wi-Fi to Strangers

Wired – By: Andy Greenberg – “In an age of surveillance anxiety, the notion of leaving your Wi-Fi network open and unprotected seems dangerously naive. But one group of activists says it can help you open up your wireless internet and not only maintain your privacy, but actually increase it in the process.

At the Hackers on Planet Earth conference next month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to release software designed to let you share a portion of your Wi-Fi network, password-free, with anyone nearby. The initiative, part of the OpenWireless.org campaign, will maintain its own flavor of free, open-source router firmware called Open Wireless Router. Good Samaritans can install this firmware on a cheap Wi-Fi router, creating a public slice of bandwidth that can dialed up or down with a simple smartphone interface.

‘We want to encourage a world of open wireless, sharing Wi-Fi with each other for privacy, efficiency, and innovation in devices that don’t have to fall back on subscriptions to wireless carriers,’ says EFF activist Adi Kamdar. Many locked wireless networks sit idle for much of the day, Kamdar argues. OpenWireless.org would put that untapped bandwidth to use while still allowing the router’s owner to take priority when needed, limiting freeloaders to as little as 5 percent of the pipe.

And just how does opening your network protect privacy, as Kamdar claims? One goal of OpenWireless.org, says EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo, is dispelling the legal notion that anything that happens on a network must have been done by the network’s owner. ‘Your IP address is not your identity, and your identity is not your IP address,’ Cardozo says. ‘Open wireless makes mass surveillance and correlation of person with IP more difficult, and that’s good for everyone.’

On the other hand, mixing a stranger’s traffic with your own can be risky. In 2011, for instance, a man in Buffalo, New York saw his home raided by a SWAT team that accused him of being a pornographer and a pedophile. The police eventually realized he’d simply left his Wi-Fi router unprotected, and a neighbor had used it to download child porn.

For anyone wary of home invasions by similarly misguided cops, OpenWireless.org says it will at some point integrate an option to route guest traffic over the anonymity software Tor or a VPN that ties it to a different IP address. But Cardozo hopes the open routers will for most users cement the idea that network owners aren’t responsible for passersby who use their connection. ‘If everyone runs open Wi-Fi, there’s no real argument that anyone is being negligent by doing so,’ he says. ‘If you’re not the person doing the illegal activity, you have no liability.’

OpenWireless.org won’t be the first attempt to create a network of open guest access points. But others who have tried the strategy, like the Spanish company Fon and British Telecom, have required users to be subscribers or pay for access. The EFF’s option will be free for all.

The first version of the software is to appear on OpenWireless.org in mid-July. The initial download will be compatible with one specific cheap Wi-Fi router that the OpenWireless developers declined to reveal until the HOPE talk. If the idea catches on, the group says it will eventually update the firmware to work on other models and eventually offer its own router with pre-installed hardware.

Anyone wishing to use the initiative’s free Wi-fi hotspots should search for networks called ‘OpenWireless.org,’ the label the project is encouraging people to give their networks. For guest users, the router software is also designed to offer better-than-average security: Each user’s link will be individually encrypted with a protocol called EAP-TLS, the equivalent of HTTPS on every connection. The price of that encryption, however, is that users must download a certificate from OpenWireless.org before accessing the free networks, a tradeoff that will no doubt limit use in favor of privacy. ‘Part of the goal here is to make open Wi-Fi as secure as logging on to a private network,’ says Ranga Krishnan, an EFF technology fellow working on the project.

Network owners may ask what incentive beyond altruism might motivate them to share limited Wi-Fi resources with strangers. The Open Wireless Router creators argue their software will be more convenient and secure than the buggy default firmware in typical Netgear and Linksys devices. Unlike those rarely-updated devices, the OpenWireless.org router firmware will be security-audited and allow users to check for updates on the devices’ smartphone-friendly web interface and quickly download updates. ‘We want to get a much better router in peoples’ hands that will improve their overall experience and security,’ says Krishnan.

Krishnan argues that users also will benefit, both personally and on a societal level, from the barrier to surveillance that comes from sharing their network with strangers. ‘This is not just a neighborly good thing to do,’ he says. ‘If you allow this kind of guest usage, it will make your traffic part of the mix and not associated with you. That gives you some protection.’

But Kamdar points instead to security guru Bruce Schneier’s famous argument that despite the security risks, leaving your Wi-Fi open is an act of civic hospitality. ‘To me, it’s basic politeness,’ Schneier wrote in 2008. ‘Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.’

Given the kind of widespread network surveillance that’s been revealed in the years since Schneier wrote that line, no one would be considered rude for keeping their network locked down. With the right tools and protections, though, sharing Wi-Fi might become as common as any other baseline social kindness. ‘For some users,’ Kamdar says, ‘A smile from a friend or neighbor is incentive enough.'”

Would YOU pay $555 Million for a “web-cam” company? Hummmmm…

Google’s Nest Buys Dropcam for $555 Million

From Re/Code – By: Liz Gannes – “Dropcam, the popular home monitoring camera startup, will be acquired by Nest, maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors. The deal is worth $555 million in cash.

Nest itself was just purchased by Google just four months ago for $3.2 billion. But the company says it is undertaking this acquisition on its own, outside of Google. Dropcam will be folded into Nest’s brand and company culture, and will also be subject to its privacy policy, Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder and VP of engineering, told Re/code in an interview Friday.

‘The teams are very well-aligned and we love the product,’ Rogers said. ‘We both think about the entire user experience from the unboxing on. We both care deeply about helping people stay connected with their homes when they’re not there.’

Rogers said the deal was signed Friday and has yet to close. The Dropcam team plans to move from San Francisco to Nest’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif.

Dropcam has never disclosed sales, but it is routinely the top-selling security camera on Amazon, and it recently branched into selling in retail stores like Apple and Best Buy. The company’s newest camera sells for $199, and a version with lower resolution and less field of view sells for $149.

But Dropcam is not solely a device company. As I wrote in a 2012 profile, it is a hardware startup with its head in the cloud. The company originally tried to use existing webcams to support a hosted personal video archive, but found the ones on the market were not up to snuff. So it began making its own.

Online storage is the other part of Dropcam’s business model. The company charges $99 per year to save a week’s worth of video at a time. Last we checked, Dropcam said 39 percent of of consumers who buy its cameras pay for its cloud storage service as well.

People concerned about the privacy implications of Google’s acquisition of Nest may be further unsettled by Nest’s purchase of a home surveillance company. Rogers anticipated that in a blog post announcing the deal, insisting there’s no reason to worry:

Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too.

By the way, if Google owning Dropcam sounds a lot like Dave Eggers’ ‘The Circle’ to you, I asked Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy about the parallels in an interview last year.

As for Eggers’s vision, Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy allowed that it was surprisingly close to home. But he said, ‘With Dropcam, it’s the individual who chooses to share. That helps keep it from being weird and dystopian.’

Prior to its acquisition, Dropcam had raised a total of $48 million from investors including Institutional Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In recent months, it had made key hires, including long-time Apple product development leader Andy Hodge, who formerly worked with members of the Nest team on the original iPod.”

I don’t think so.

The Turing Test is supposed to be a test, that, if beaten, means that we have fully achieved “real” artificial intelligence. The chatbot named “Eugene Goostman” is not it! (In my humble opinion.) The chatbot has to be able to fool 30%, or more, of the human participants in the conversation. Supposedly, “Eugene” did that. Uh huh. Does it count if the humans are of below par intelligence, and can’t recognize a chatbot when they are typing back and forth?

See what Ray Kurzweil said when asked about the test:

https://www.kurzweilai.net/response-by-ray-kurzweil-to-the-announcement-of-chatbot-eugene-goostman-passing-the-turing-test

You see what I mean.

Some have called Elon Musk, “the real world Tony Stark,” because he does radical stuff like this!

Tesla goes ‘open source’ with patents

By: Susan Decker, Alan Ohnsman and Mark Clothier – Bloomberg News

“Washington – Elon Musk wants to apply the contrarian style that made him millions of dollars from PayPal and billions from rocket ships and electric cars, and revolutionize the litigious world of patents.

Tesla Motors became a rarity among automakers when Musk Thursday pledged that inventions on his electric cars and batteries will be free for anyone to use ‘in good faith.’ The move may speed the adoption of technology that Musk needs to make his fledging line of cars more than a luxury niche.

Patents are a trade-off that give companies the right to block others from using a specific technology in exchange for making the idea public so others can analyze and build on it. The alternatives are to keep the technology a trade secret or, as in the case of the Linux computing system, make the information available to everyone. Tesla is adopting a third way – continue to patent, but let the public use it at will.

‘The more people that use the technology, the more valuable the market,’ said Zorina Khan, an economics professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and author of ‘The Democratization of Invention.’

The move shows Musk positioning Palo Alto, California-based Tesla for a more open relationship with the global auto industry than the one-off projects it’s had with investors Toyota and Daimler to supply battery packs and motors. He met this week with executives from Bayerische Motoren Werke and said he recommended that BMW collaborate by using Tesla’s rapid- charge system and even build its own battery factory.

Tesla has more than 160 issued U.S. patents for things like a system to protect battery packs from overcharging and an improved rotor construction in an electric motor, according to the website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

While Musk’s strategy is not unique to the technology industry – IBM employed it nine years ago – it’s an unusual move for automakers. Car companies ‘traditionally lock their intellectual property in a vault and steal everyone else’s,’ said Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

The other automakers, which have so far treated Tesla as an outsider, may actually be receptive to Musk’s plan, according to Gordon.

Taking an ‘open source’ approach can lead to others adding to the technology and cross-licensing, as well as ‘greater goodwill’ and benefits ‘from the specialized skills of a competitor,’ Khan said.

Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux computer operating system, made it available for free to anyone. That’s led to its growth, including its role in the creation of Google Inc.’s Android operating system. Google in turn made Android free and found a way to make money from it through mobile advertising. Android is now the world’s most popular operating system for mobile devices.

Tesla is reserving the right to go after infringers in limited circumstances. Musk said his company would use ‘common sense’ in deciding whether to assert its patents – such as a carmaker that uses the inventions to confuse consumers into thinking the car is a Tesla. It also could strike back should Tesla ever be accused of using another company’s technology.

‘Somebody can’t go and use a whole bunch of our patents but then sue us for using one of theirs,’ Musk said ‘That seems like it wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do.’

The 42-year-old billionaire cited the patent battles between Apple and Samsung Electronics over smartphones and tablet computers as something the car industry should avoid.

‘Who’s really benefiting there?’ he said. ‘You’ve got all these depositions and dirty laundry getting aired and it’s a big distraction for the management team.'”

(Cross-posted from VirtZine) – The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is out! Check out the new features (especially the inclusion of Docker technology!)

Announcing the General Availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7!

Red Hat Custoemr Portal Announcement – “Red Hat is pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, available today on the Red Hat Customer Portal. Built to meet modern datacenter demands as well as next-generation IT requirements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures.

While providing the agility, flexibility and stability to meet new requirements head-on without increasing complexity, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 also delivers military-grade security, mission-critical reliability, and the performance and ease-of-use capabilities to efficiently manage and run your environment.

Key Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 features include:

• Lightweight, portable Docker containers run applications at near bare-metal speed providing isolation and leveraging SELinux for increased security.
• Improved filesystem enhancements including a default XFS filesystem that supports up to 500TB, improvements to NFS 4 adding extended attributes with SELinux labels, and LVM supporting whole volume snapshots with rollback.
• Improved interoprability with Microsoft Active Directory domains, allowing Red Hat Enterprise Linux clients to integrate more easily within heterogeneous datacenters.
• Centralized management of processes, services, security, and other resources using systemd allowing enhanced, granular control of your system.
• Performance tool utilities such as TUNA, Thermostat, and Performance Co-Pilot to allow you to monitor, measure, and resolve application problems.
• New management tools like OpenLMI help to create uniformity and standardized administration across systems by managing storage, network, and high-availability resources.
• Refined control over system subscriptions allows you to set support priority, audit systems reliably, and see how you’re using your subscriptions at a glance.

Along with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, we’re making improvements to ensure that customers have a better product experience in our Customer Portal.”

As a Linux pro, this was an article that stroked MY ego! Maybe it will make YOUR day too!

The sought after Linux professional

OpenSource.com By: Shawn Powers – “There’s no such thing as ‘just a Linux sysadmin,’ which is what makes Linux professionals so incredibly valuable. We’ve all been hearing that the demand for Linux professionals is ‘at its highest ever!!!’ for years. In recent years, though, it hasn’t just been Linux nuts like me saying it. You may reference the 2014 Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and assume they’re biased, but a quick search over at Monster.com shows that the demand for Linux professionals is a real thing.

Linux has been around for decades, so why the sudden interest?

Flexibility.

Sure, I mean Linux is flexible, but more than that, Linux System Administrators are flexible. It’s not news to anyone that Linux is gaining popularity in part due to its dominance in the cloud and the datacenter. And certainly that large install base needs sysadmins who understand Linux and how it works. More importantly, however, companies need sysadmins who can make those cloud based services work with their particular internal needs.

If you need someone to integrate your homegrown database system with a cloud based Linux infrastructure, you need a Linux professional. Take my personal experience when transitioning from a Linux-centric server room to a Microsoft dominated company. My certifications are strictly network and Linux-based (specifically CCNA & LPIC/Linux+). Still, I was confident applying for a management position in a database department that used 100% Microsoft SQL, even though I’d never touched MSQL in my life. And I never claimed to do so in my interviews, because I understand conceptually what needs to be done. I have first-hand experience with integrating various operating systems, so learning the nuances of Microsoft-specific procedures didn’t worry me at all.

I got the job, and after a year I can assure you my lack of first-hand experience didn’t affect my ability to lead a team or make technical decisions. My point? Linux users tend to be a cut above the rest, not because they’re inherently smarter or better, but because Linux requires you to understand what you’re doing on a level that’s not required with Windows. That conceptual understanding is invaluable, and interviewers know it. As Linux users and pros, we’ve been learning to integrate into heterogenous environments our entire careers. It’s easy to find a strictly Microsoft shop, but 100% Linux? That’s almost unheard of. That means as Linux administrators, we have been forced to understand multiple systems in order to do the simplest of tasks. Think about it, every Linux user in the world would be able to configure a network connection in Windows 7. If they didn’t know how, it would be really easy to figure out. Then, take a Windows administrator and ask them to set up a static IP on a Debian server? That’s far less common.

What makes Linux professionals valuable

In order to fill those desperately needed Senior Administrator positions, Linux folks need to have a firm grasp of what Linux can and can’t do. Is scaling to the cloud a wise move? Will database latency cause transaction errors if queries take place over the Internet? Can we use a cloud service like Amazon, or do we have to use Azure due to Microsoft specific code?

In order to answer those tough questions, not only must a sysadmin be comfortable in their area of expertise, but they must have understanding and experience in cross-platform solutions. Like I pointed out earlier, this pretty much describes what it means to be a Linux professional! Nobody likes hiring or even working with an arrogant Linux zealot. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get an air of superiority. The key to being hirable (and not being a jerk) is to turn that arrogance into fearlessness. Don’t call your potential employer stupid for implementing a Microsoft virtualization platform, tell them how excited you are to get your hands on it so you can learn what advantages and disadvantages it offers.

Who knows, maybe you’ll eventually replace their entire system with open source—but you won’t even have the chance if you start off by insulting them.

What if you have not been using Linux your entire career? What if you haven’t had a career yet at all? That’s the beauty of open source. Nothing, I repeat, nothing about working with Linux is a secret. By design, every bit of information is available freely on the Internet. You can download multiple distributions, countless open source applications, and enough documentation to make your eyes cross. All for free. Certainly there are advantages to professional training when it comes to learning Linux, but not because trainers have access to anything not already available to anyone.

Linux and open source software, coupled with the Internet, have leveled the playing field when it comes to learning and growing as a professional. I’m a Linux professional today because in my early 20s I couldn’t afford to study anything else. Today, I couldn’t be happier with those humble beginnings. Linux has changed my life, and if the studies and job searches are any indication, it can change yours too.”